Based on my experience with the the Betas, I’m looking forward to the full release of 11.04 and the Unity interface. As mentioned in the earlier post, Unity is a big change from the previous Gnome interface, and it will take some getting used to for longtime Ubuntu users. Fortunately, some good documentation is available for those of you interested in tweaking Unity’s behavior, and learning the power-user hotkeys. I’ll include a summary of the most useful tips and tweaks at the end of the post, along with links to the full original articles.

As for the rationale behind Unity, I recently spoke with Jane Silber, CEO of Canonical, and Gerry Carr, Canonical’s Director of Communications. They explained that Unity is an attempt to provide an interface much more like a smartphone than Windows 95. Unity provides better application status feedback than the classic Gnome interface, and makes search of both applications and data a primary focus of the UI.

The move to a smartphone-like user interface is certain to annoy those of us who are comfortable with an interface based on files and folders, hierarchical menus of applications, and a command line; however, the core functionality we actually care about is still there behind the shiny new front-end.

Speaking of that shiny new front-end, another point that Gerry and Jane made was that they are hoping to attract Windows users who are looking for alternatives to the de facto upgrade path from Microsoft. Unity is snazzy enough to catch the attention of potential converts, and, let’s face it, a smartphone interface is a paradigm that most people are already or soon will be intuitively familiar with. In that light, Unity is a perfectly sensible way to grow the Ubuntu user base, while still keeping the underlying functionality that longtime users require.